addie

Alonne runback is some bullshit. I reckon bed of chaos, magic smelter demon, darklurker, and (especially) the reindeer run to the twin pets are all much worse, though. DS3 doesn't have any that are particularly bad, and ER generally has stakes near bosses - they've mostly learned their design lesson.

If you start at the firelink bonfire, you can travel down to Londo, and at the place where the first ghosts appear, drop down to the "square pool of water" in the lower ruins. Beat up one darkwraith, put on your 4K gear, and run through to the spiral staircase. Not terrible.

Can't imagine your 4K gear being anything other than Havel's, the stamina shield, and your highest DPS weapon, and your tactics r1-r1-r1-r1-r1-estus-repeat, of course. Even on an SL1 run, they're not exactly a 'strategy' boss.

Well, there are some 'poorly optimised' games out there. Am able to run eg. Cyberpunk 2077 near maximum (non-raytraced) settings and it happily trundles along at 80+ fps. Would really like to play Mind Over Magic, just my kind of game and which looks like it was done on the Quake3 engine, and I'm struggling since it runs like absolute ass regardless of what the settings are. Think that's the joy of Unity, though.

I think a lot of the problem is that we're long past the point where diminishing returns kick in. Doubling the amount of processing required for a few percent more lighting fidelity, that kind of thing. Half Life 2 was expensive for its day, mostly due to its extended development - about $40m then, equivalent of ~$70m now - but it still looks great, mostly due to its strong art style. (I realise Valve keep sneakily updating the engine, so things like the water effects are much better now than they were on release.) There's games that cost ten times as much and which don't really look a lot better, but which will get tagged as 'badly optimised' since they're chasing the very latest graphical shinies.

I think the sheer price of producing all of those HD assets is a significant risk to any studio, and means that we end up with a lot of cookie-cutter AAA games where the industry is very cautious about taking chances of any kind. Maybe I'm not the main target for the shiniest of graphics, but my Steam games with the most hours - Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, the Dark Souls series, Crusader Kings - run the gamut from 'charmingly simple' to 'functionally realistic', but I'd not describe any of them as great because of their graphics.

So does the presence of autistic women imply the existence of the 'lady foreskin'?

Mysteries of the female anatomy never cease to amaze.

Mark Z. Danielewski for the win. House of Leaves is superb; 50 Year Sword is interesting, but doesn't quite scratch the itch. I see he's got something new out this year as well, will need to check it out.

As well as being able to 'rent' disk games, the Disk System could also connect to a couple of inputs on the system to play audio, which means the FDS versions of eg. Zelda and Castlevania have another track available for sound, so their tunes are particularly banging on this system.

In the west, those inputs were repurposed for the 10NES anti-piracy system, so we got worse music and a console that was less reliable, particularly with age. Yay.

Yeah. Being able to 'rent' games like this makes more sense if you live in a very compact house and having access to stuff that you don't need to store seems like a good deal. Having a higher population density such that each of these kiosks serves a larger number of customers makes them viable if the margins were quite thin in the first place.

Vim is my preferred 'IDE' for C++, Python, Bash, and general configuration file editing. It's got some big pluses:

• its text editing is superb once you've mastered it, but that's a small part of its benefits when used as an IDE, and 'Vim mode' in other environments kind of undersells what else it can do

• Vim has some great plugins for development. YouCompleteMe is awesome for predictive completion and showing docs, but NerdTree for file management and TagBar for showing structure are amazing as well. They're all very configurable and they get out of your way.

• Vim lives in your terminal window, so you can do splits and tabs using whichever terminal you like. Kitty is very fast and configurable and keeps out your way. Being able to have multiple tabs of Vim open, a tab for compilation, a tab for debugging, a tab for version control, a tab for man pages, and being able to flip between them without taking your fingers off the keyboard makes for a very fast workflow

• Vim makes it very easy to edit binary files and be precise about whitespace changes, so it's easy to make a minimal change for raising a PR.

If you assign a hotkey to run a macro in Vim, then that can be made very flexible - saving and formatting all open windows, then invoking CMake to do a build and CTest to run all your unit tests can be put on a function key if you like. Trying to tell Eclipse to "just run CMake to do the build" seems to be an exercise in frustration; so many IDEs are terrible at "just getting out of the way".

Work pays for an IntelliJ licence for using Java. Java is so unwieldy without a proper IDE that it's hard to code in it without it. I certainly don't love it, though, and they seem determined to make every new version worse with bizarre new features. Flexible minimalist editing with configurable plugins is all that you really need, and on that basis Geany looks pretty good - will give it a try.

Allows the very important 'overwrite files while they're open' functionality used during update. Write all the new files for a service then restart it. No need to reboot the whole machine for that.

Looking at you, Windows, and your bullshit scheduled reboots.

Can't agree with those things being sandwiches.

Hotdogs are encased on three sides, and are therefore tacos, but poptarts and ravioli encase their fillings on all sides - that makes them calzones.

https://cuberule.com/ has the details.

I had one of the Macintosh iBook G4s with the notoriously shitty graphics card soldering. Early days of lead-free soldering. Mine started to fail just outside of warranty. The 'fix' was to put a lot of pressure on the chip so that all the connections were held in place, but that was quite difficult to do while it was still a laptop.

Dismantled the damn thing, yeeted the plastic shell, and screwed the remains onto a sheet of plywood. Looked a lot like pizza-box PC in the corner there. Got another couple of years out of it. Made it a lot more convenient for watching videos, since you could just prop the whole thing against a wall or whatever. Couple of USB extension leads meant that you could still use a mouse and keyboard in comfort.

And having to buy shoes and trousers from specialists, and having your feet hang off the end of the bed in hotels, and wandering into spiderwebs that no-one else has disturbed yet, and not being able to adjust the shower high enough away from home. Gift that keeps on giving.

In Java, all objects are passed to methods 'by reference', and there is no way to mark them as immutable. So strictly speaking, they're all 'out variables'. This is the cause of a lot of mistakes in Java, where you eg. pass a list to a method, which then mutates it in some way. That will change the original that the caller passed in, which is normally unintended and may break class invariants. So Java tends to have an absurd number of 'safety copies' and immutable wrappers of collections.

I'd probably describe the inability to mark things immutable as the main problem with Java. The golden rule of concurrency is that if you share mutable state, you must use an appropriate synchronisation primitive. It's not easy to mark things immutable (final doesn't do what const does in C++) and although you can make class internals private if you like, the junior devs at my work will come along and add accessor methods.

tl:dr; yes it does. Passing an AtomicBoolean as a method argument will do as a built-in 'mutable object that holds a boolean and can be checked by caller', although it'll be slower than your own custom object since it does sync you won't need.